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A Trial by Fire for Tisch and Mamdani, New York’s Premier Odd Couple Ask who never gets charged. Log In Email * Password * Remember Me Forgot Your Password? Log In New to The Nation? Subscribe Print subscriber? Activate your online access Skip to content Skip to footer A Trial by Fire for Tisch and Mamdani, New York’s Premier Odd Couple Magazine Newsletters Subscribe Log In Search Subscribe Donate Magazine Latest Archive Podcasts Newsletters Sections Politics World Economy Culture Books & the Arts The Nation About Events Contact Us Advertise Current Issue Politics / March 12, 2026 A Trial by Fire for Tisch and Mamdani, New York’s Premier Odd Couple How this weekend’s failed attack outside Gracie Mansion could reinforce the strange-bedfellows alliance between the mayor and the police commissioner. D.D. Guttenplan Share Copy Link Facebook X (Twitter) Bluesky Pocket Email Ad Policy New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch briefs the press on the attack outside of Gracie Mansion as Mayor Zohran Mamdani looks on. (Ryan Murphy / Getty Images) Counting all its government agencies and departments, the city of New York currently employs just under 300,000 people. However, only a few hundred of these—commissioners, agency heads, and the mayor’s own staff—serve at the pleasure of the mayor. In the coming weeks, as the legislature and the governor negotiate the state’s budget—a process that has a statutory deadline of April 1, but in practice has often blown through that target—we can expect to hear from two of them, First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan and Budget Director Sherif Soliman. This past week has put another member of the city administration in the spotlight: Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a holdover from the Eric Adams administration. A confrontation outside the mayor’s residence on Saturday—and the arrest on federal terrorism charges of two alleged Muslim extremists—offered a vivid reminder of the ways in which perceptions of crime and public safety remain central to New Yorkers’ sense of their city. And their sense of how New York’s politicians are performing.. Back in June 2020, when Mamdani was not yet even a freshman assemblyman, the young candidate, responding to both the national crisis in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and a long record of brutality by the New York Police Department (from the killings of Eleanor Bumpurs and Eric Garner to the NYPD’s use of pepper spray just a few days earlier at an LGBTQ+ Pride rally), took what at the time was a popular position on the left. Current Issue April 2026 Issue “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” Mamdani tweeted. “What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.” This was the quote weaponized by some of Mamdani’s opponents during last year’s primary—and for which he eventually apologized during an interview with The New York Times in September. Two months later, shortly after his election as mayor, Mamdani announced that he would retain Tisch, whom Adams had appointed a year earlier following the abrupt resignation of Commissioner Keechant Sewell. A veteran public servant who headed Bill De Blasio’s Department of Information Technology and then was widely …